Mobile Technologies

Orient Software offers mobile development for all popular mobile platforms. Our extensive knowledge on each platform’s features and the real-world experience of building successful applications for all of them means that you can trust us to make the most appropriate technology choices for your mobile business ambitions.

Technology

Mobile Development

In mobile app development, there are in general three approaches to technology choice.

Native Applications

The most traditional mobile development approach is native application. Native mobile app development is characterized by separate source code and development environment for each mobile platform, operating system or even specific device. Example of this are apps with separate versions for each Apple iPhone and iPad releases.

The benefits of native apps include higher performance and ability to fully utilize the hardware features of the device. However native development can require a lot of resources, as there is the need to maintain several projects to support each platform, and every platform has its own development tools, which need to be learned first. For these reasons, many companies opt for alternate solutions.

Cross-platform Applications

Very popular alternative is to develop a cross-platform mobile application. There are many frameworks available, that allow us to maintain just one project for the application, by writing the code once and adapting it to each environment. The major advantage of this approach is maintainability, and new features can be added quicker while keeping the different device versions consistent with each other.

The frameworks to develop mobile cross-platform applications have improved considerably, making this a realistic solution. However certain apps that require high performance or really advanced utilization of specific device’s unique features, can have problems with this approach.

HTML5 Applications

Mobile applications fully based on HTML5 are often called “mobile web”. In this case you would develop a mobile app using the same tools you use when developing a web app or creating a website. The major advantage of this approach is affordability, as all the tools are readily available and mobile development can be integrated with web development.

However, while HTML5 can be used to create impressive mobile-first sites and apps, this approach will have lower performance. Besides, a mobile website largely ignores the differences of user experience and typical user expectations of different smartphone platforms, and therefore it is recommended to conduct thorough user acceptance testing with actual end users of your mobile app.

Orient Software Expertise

At Orient, we have a long experience on native mobile development for all the common platforms:

Based on your needs and requirements, we will determine together, if a native app for each supported platform is the best way to go, or if we start developing a cross-platform application or even go for a mobile web application.

Considerations on Mobile Technologies

As you start your mobile app development project, it is good to discuss about some potential issues that may raise during the requirements gathering, development, testing or actual production use of the mobile application.

We’ve learned that a critical ingredient for a project’s success is our client’s tolerance of the issues and hurdles specific to the mobile development. A few examples might include the following:

Solving Issues by Close Cooperation

Getting a realistic overview of what kind of hurdles may be expecting you in a mobile application development project allows us to build a close cooperation. We will support you throughout the process and deliver you quality software regardless of your technology choice.